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Sunday, July 6, 2008

The Housewife's Birthday

Two of my close friends and I have a birthday tradition. Oh yea...did I mention it was my birthday a few weeks ago? No? Oh well, it was.

Mona (see 1st picture) for the second year in a row has taken Stephanie and me out to dinner for our birthdays. My friend Stephanie's birthday is 1 day after mine... and we're the same age, so Mona gets to kill to birds, err friends, with one stone.

What I love about these two is they love to eat, just like me. So I look forward to our birthday date every year, because Mona always picks the best restaurants. You can find her all over Yelp.

This year was over the top. Mona surprised us with a trip to Rosemary's. Neither Steph nor I had ever been there, but everyone who's anyone goes to Rosemary's. I had been wanting to go for years because I kept hearing how good it was. I will tell you, this place is one of the top places to eat in Las Vegas. Forget about the high priced, swanky restaurants on the strip- this place blows 99% of those away. If you ever come to visit, GO.

Not only are the dishes beautiful to look at, they're sure to please the taste buds. Steph and I had the "Dinner Sampler" - with beer. What this is is a 5 course meal with a different beer for each course. Not a whole beer (I'm a lush but I'm not that much of a lush), just a few ounces. Just enough to sip on while your taste buds explode with excitement.

There is just enough food in each course to leave you full, but still wanting more. The sauces on each plate are very obviously made slowly and with an expert's hand. Each bite of food has a different flavor. Each flavor goes perfectly with the next.

How could you not salivate over a plate that looks like this? I got to eat FIVE plates like this. Yum yum yum yum yum. The beer was even good. Lots of summery, light, hoppy flavored microbrews. I hadn't even heard of two of them, and I'm always thrilled to try new beer.

The funnest part of the date was the end of the night. It's kind of a long, crazy story but... long story short... Mona surprised Steph and me by taking us to Baskin Robbins. If you know Baskin Robbins, you know that they advertise having 31 flavors of ice cream.

Stephanie and I were turning 31. (yes, I'll give my age away...I'm not ashamed)

Mona had sneaked coolers from home into her car, pulled us into the ice cream shop (she literally had to say "GET in there now" to me because I wanted to go home lol), and then said we each got to leave with 31 scoops of ice cream! How cool is that?

So picture this: Stephanie and me kind of in shock (because we were so surprised), trying to order 31 different scoops of ice cream. Each. There was a lot of giggling and "oh my god's!", and we even made friends with the ice cream scooper guy.

So we walked out of there with two big coolers FULL of different flavored scoops of ice cream. 62 scoops to be exact. One for each year we've been alive. It was the end of a very yummy and very fun night.

I drove home that night thinking about how lucky I am to have such great friends. I walked into my 31st birthday thinking it was going to be just another day, and it turned out to be a great day with great memories to look back on.

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After all, how many people can say they got 31 scoops of ice cream for their birthday?